Retronator

I’ve had the joy of spending some time at the art studio of Christian Bazant-Hegemark in Vienna in 2018 and 2019 and got to know a game-developer-turned-fine-artist whose works fluently move between drawings, paintings, the computer generated, and back from digital to physical.

Stumbling down the freshly updated archive of his artistic journey, I wanted to highlight Pixelations, two series of pixel art works that bring Christian’s distinct voice to our medium.

Diary Works from 2020 (seen above) capture personal moments through his own lens. They are highly realistic, yet—through pixels and colors—stylized so that they put another level of nostalgia on top of the already rose-tinted glasses of remembering our past through moments frozen in time.

Political Works he started in 2017 are on the other hand pixel art interpretations of other photographers’ documentation of world events.

They make me remember RIOT: Civil Unrest, a simulation game that similarly used pixel art stylization to represent less joyful aspects of humankind. There’s something eerie in this juxtaposition, a welcome take that helps widen the expressiveness of our medium. To me it visualizes the cold 4th wall that separates my own life from the events happening elsewhere in the world. Can we really understand something we observe only through a (pixelated) computer screen?

Just like with other works by Christian, be it his large scale paintings or fragmented drawings, I can’t help but pause for a moment as his interpretations force me to explore complex emotions granted from a perspective different than my own.

To learn more about Christian, visit his website, and follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Time flies fast and it’s hard to believe it’s been 4 years since Flynn: Son of Crimson by @thunderhorseco debuted on Kickstarter. I’m sure the devs (as all of us with crowdfunded games) wished time passed slower so we could make our estimated delivery dates, and Flynn—originally planned to release in February 2019—confirms my theory that Kickstarted games on average take 3–4 times as long to complete than predicted. It also speaks to my other theory, that the end result is most often well worth the wait! (Indie) game development is just hard and takes time.

I already put Flynn on my top 10 list of favorite upcoming pixel art games at the end of 2017 and the art holds up and even overdelivers in its release variety of environments and smooth animations. I’ll let the trailer do the speaking, and if you like a good action platformer, you can pick the game up on Steam ($18 during launch) or consoles.

Dwerve, the tower defense crawler RPG that I wrote about previously during its Kickstarter, just got a new trailer and a demo!

The fresh look into the game’s backstory of warsmiths comes from PAX West and is as smooth as ever (watch it above). Visitors of the convention are also welcomed to play the new Dwerve: Prologue, as are you (if you’re staying at home), since it’s available for free on Steam.

If this is your first look at Dwerve, it plays as an action RPG, except when battle time comes, you’re placing down turrets to do your bidding, smoothly transitioning the gameplay into tower defense. Give the demo a try and experience beautiful art from Pixel Pete, Enchae, and Sun Pixels while kicking some troll butt.

An awesome Kickstarter came across me this morning and it’s from no other then Emma ‘Eniko’ Maassen of Kitsune Games (previously on Kickstarter with Lore Finder).

I’m super excited, because this time she’s doing an educational video series explaining some of the cool ways old games did 3D graphics. Coding History: 3D from Mode7 to DOOM will cover (at least) 12 episodes, the 7 originally planned ones and 5 added through the first stretch goal:

• Sprite based 3D dungeons (Lands of Lore, Phantasy Star)
• Pseudo 3D (Outrun)
• Raycasting (Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad)
• Mode 7 (Super Mario Kart, F-Zero)
• Voxel terrain (Comanche)
• Binary space partitions (DOOM)
• Portals (Duke Nukem 3D/Build Engine)
• Polygonal software rendering
• Perspective
• Flat polygon shading
• Textured polygon shading
• Programmable pipeline (shaders)
  

Just watching the campaign video made me look forward to enjoying footage of old games while also learning how they made them work—and how you can code such engines yourself too! 

If you’d like to support Eniko’s efforts to let us all geek out over computer rendering, hop on over to Kickstarter and send some funds her way.

Back in 2018/2019 when new features of Pixel Art Academy were being released quite frequently, I started my Pixel Art Academy 101 series of videos where new concepts were explained when they entered alpha stage (early access).

I haven’t been sleeping since then and it’s time to start Pixel Art Academy 102, a new season of video updates that will focus on the next chapter of the game, leading with the learning materials added to the Retropolis Academy of Art Study Guide.

It’s been almost 2 years since Savior completed its Kickstarter campaign, and oh boy was this blog in need of an update of awesome GIFs and environments from my most anticipated parkour/fighting game.

What’s extra interesting about their backer updates is that you get to see a lot of locations in their concept art phases (drawn by Robert Borth), which is not something we often see for pixel art games, especially concept illustrations with such clean execution.

It’s even more amazing when you get to see these turned into gorgeous, animated pixels by Weston Tracy and the team.

We also got a decent look into Savior’s features and story back in March during the Future Games Spring Showcase:

If you want to follow the development of Starsoft’s debut title, hop over to their website for social media links.

Almost a year ago I announced that I’m starting to run a physical school called The Indie Quest where my game’s art curriculum is being used. I’ll be talking about the whole experience in my 6-year anniversary video in August, but I also recently started doing The Indie Quest vlog where I talk about the school on a biweekly basis.

The sixth episode above is especially interesting for this blog since I talk about how the Pixel Art Academy curriculum comes together in the environment concept art missions at The Indie Quest. Check it out to learn more about the work I do at the school.

Environment concept art of the island Hapunui for my game Pixel Art Academy.

Very much inspired by 90s dithered point-and-click adventure backgrounds, in particular Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Some more words on the devlog (4 posts in total) or in today’s Spelkollektivet livestream.

This is not your usual Retronator post, but I’m a huge computer science nerd, so when I saw how well NVIDIA and Cornell’s GANcraft neural network transformed a Minecraft voxel world into a realistic representation, I just had to make some GIFs and share it with you.

I’ll let Károly from the excellent Two Minute Papers channel share the enthusiasm further:

And if you want to see the original researchers’ video, take a look here:

There are more and more art styles that live on the spectrum between pixels, voxels, and low-poly 3D. One interesting approach has always been sprite stacking, a technique for rendering voxel art by drawing individual pixel art cross-sections and offsetting them to create depth.

SpriteStack by Przemysław ‘Rezoner’ Sikorski is a specialized tool that lets you do just that. We got a teaser recently of all the upcoming features for the 2021 version and it’s really pushing the software beyond its humble (but very well received) beginnings back in 2019.

The development has hit a bit of a snag in 2020 (a hard year for many), but luckily Rezoner didn’t let the project die completely and is finally back, ready to bring the new features to release.

The 2021 version needs a couple more months of uninterrupted work to get done, so you can help Rezoner get them by supporting him on Patreon or by buying the previous version on Itch ($30) or Steam (currently on sale for $24).

If you haven’t heard yet, Apogee is back! They announced their return to publishing back in April with a combination of new titles and remasters of their classics. They already released Crystal Caves HD back in October last year and I was very happy about it since a good buddy of mine, Primož from Emberheart Games (Courier of the Crypts), made the conversion.

This week another Apogee remaster was released, Secret Agent HD! The classic title from 1992 was drawn by George Broussard and now comes with spruced up colors thanks to Primož.

That’s what I love about Emberheart Games’ remakes, they’re remasters with a wider palette, but otherwise stick to the original pixel art. Just like Crystal Caves HD, the new Secret Agent also comes with a bunch of other goodies like smooth scrolling and movement, a level editor, a completely new episode with more enemies …

If this brings out a tear of nostalgia, you can relive your childhood memories on Steam or GOG ($8).

As for Primož, he’s already working on the next remaster, Monster Bash HD! Check out the Emberheart Games Discord to stay in touch.

One project I’m still looking very much forward to—regardless of its challenging development cycle—is Starr Mazer. Starting its way on Kickstarter in early 2015, updates on the space-fighting adventure got sparse as legal drama surrounded the project in 2017. That’s a story for another day—the important thing is, the project never stopped. As Confucius said about Kickstarter projects, “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” At least if you keep your backers updated.

And updated we got! The hundredth one hit today and it’s filled to the brink with new details from the development plus the usual relentless enthusiasm of creative director Don Thacker (whom you might have seen in the splendorous spectacle that was Devolver MaxPass+ Showcase, which he directed). I’ll let you dive into the Drydock Report on your own, I just wanted to do you the service of getting the best of the 2021 GIFs and PNGs from the evolving world of the point-and-click-and-shmup adventur hybrid in front of your eyes on the blog.

It’s a good time for Sonic The Hedgehog fans as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the platformer series, which launched on the Sega Genesis (a.k.a. Mega Drive) on June 23, 1991.

On Wednesday we were delighted with an orchestra performance that kept on giving, as the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra switched (and joined) airtime with Tomoya Ohtani Band (Sonic’s sound director) and Crush 40 (contributors of many rock/metal songs to Sonic’s soundtracks over the years).

And if this wasn’t enough, Epic put Sonic Mania on their store for free for the next two weeks! It’s a must have since it’s the only modern pixel art Sonic game released in the last decade. A bunch of artists from the scene worked on the title, including @superpietepiet and @midio. Go grab it while it’s hot (again)!

I was a big fan of Antoine ‘Sir Carma’ Lendrevie’s voxel art ever since I wrote my big article on pixels and voxels in 2016. Not long after, Antoine moved to Vancouver—the home of Brace Yourself Games—and started working as lead artist (and now art director, among other artists) on the simulation/strategy game Industries of Titan.

What followed were 4 years of patiently looking at cubes being carefully arranged into delicious dioramas on his Twitter, merging slowly into vast sci-fi cityscapes you can marvel at in the screenshots above (make sure to see them up big to take in all the voxel detail).

Finally the good news, you can now start colonizing the largest moon of Saturn yourself, as Industries of Titan landed in early access yesterday on Steam and Epic!

The world of Norco is just something else. The southern USA point-and-click adventure has been no stranger on this blog. Quite to the contrary, thanks to the magic of Tumblr I’ve had my eyes on @geographyofrobots’ project all the way back in its EGA days.

A lot has happened since my last look over a year ago, most recently this week Geography of Robots won the Tribeca Games Award, the latest addition to New York’s Tribeca (film) festival. The competition was strong and you can see the entries in the presentation where Norco gets introduced by the by-now-already-memeified Norman Reedus (at the 25:53 mark). It was nice to also finally put a face to Yuts after all these years.

In other news, Raw Fury picked up the publishing part of Norco’s release process. There’s even a new demo out that you can play right now on Steam.

No release date has been announced yet, so maybe there’ll be another post on this blog about the game in a year or so. We’ll see!